Major housing crunch prompts Rutgers to approve plans for new dorms in Piscataway

Sunday April 12, 2009, 9:05 AM

Rutgers UniversityAn artist rendering of new dormitories scheduled to be built at Rutgers University, on the Livingston campus in Piscataway, by the fall of 2011. Retail space is planned on the ground floor of the dorm complex.

Last fall, the on-campus housing crunch at Rutgers University forced officials to book rooms for 370 students in a hotel.

This fall it will be worse. An expected 700 to 800 students will be placed in hotel rooms, this time in two hotels: the Crowne Plaza and the Holiday Inn in Somerset.

To help address the deepening housing shortage at the New Brunswick and Piscataway campuses, the Rutgers University Board of Governors recently approved a $272 million plan to build new dormitories slated to open in fall 2011.

"We need to take some pressure off the system," said Antonio Calcado, the university's director of facilities and capital planning. The last time the university built housing was in the 1980s, Calcado said.

Rutgers is already the nation's second-largest provider of on-campus housing for college students, but projections say the housing need is growing. Next fall, 1,000 more students are expected to enroll in classes compared with last year, said Courtney McAnuff, the university's enrollment director.

The increase of 1,000 more students on campus next fall is expected to be caused by a higher retention rate, not more new students, McAnuff said. With fewer jobs on the market, it's less attractive to drop out of school these days, and many students are expected to "speed up their degree" and not take time off school, he said.

Of the 1,000 additional students, about 600 are expected to be students attending classes in New Brunswick and Piscataway, with the remaining going to Rutgers facilities in Newark and Camden, he said.

Under the new plan approved last week to build new housing complexes, the university will build two facilities, both in Piscataway, for 2,000 students.

On the Busch campus, adjacent to the Busch Dining Hall, two four-story residences would accomodate 500 freshmen. On the Livingston campus, at the intersection of Joyce Kilmer Road and Rockefeller Road, a multi-building complex with retail on the ground floor would house 1,500 undergraduate and graduate students. Both sites are currently small parking lots, Calcado said.

Much of the new housing will be in suite-style, with two bedrooms and a shared bathroom for four students, either all-male or all-female, he said. Traditional dorms with multiple single rooms along a hallway and one shared bathroom for the entire floor are a trend of the past, Calcado said.

"The old gang bathrooms and showers, nobody builds them anymore. They're not very appealing, I guess," he said.

The university expects to recoup the entire $272 million construction cost within 30 years through student rental payments, Calcado said. Rent for the units hasn't yet been set, he said.

Last fall, none of the students living in hotels were freshmen, and those students were given university housing for the current semester as rooms became available, said Ken Branson, a university spokesman.

This fall there will be a shuttle bus to transport students from Somerset and the New Brunswick and Piscataway campuses, Branson said.

At the university's main campus in New Brunswick and Piscataway, roughly 13,500 students of the total 36,000 live on campus. Michigan State University is the largest provider of on-campus housing in the nation, with beds for more than 15,000 students, said Michigan State spokesman Tom Oswald.

Several Rutgers students said on campus last week that they preferred on-campus housing because classes are a short walk away.

Rutgers sophomore Henry Chen, 20, said he currently lives in an on-campus dorm. Last fall he noticed four people living in his dorm's lounge, he said.

The new dorms sound "nice" but, "it's going to take a while," Chen said.

Next year, the engineering major said, he may have to live in a hotel. In January when the university gave out lottery numbers, Chen received a number near 4,000 and thought it was a good number. But the cutoff to live in a double was 3,093, Branson said.